


Reunion

by disgruntled_owl



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Brother-Sister Relationships, Brother/Sister Incest, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 10:19:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8887165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disgruntled_owl/pseuds/disgruntled_owl
Summary: Young Thomas Sharpe meets Lucille at the Swiss sanitarium on the eve of her release. After seven years apart, the siblings must rediscover one another.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Heather](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/gifts).



“Sign and date here, Lord Sharpe, if you please.”

Thomas gazed at the blank space in the sanitarium register. A drop of ink fell from the tip of his pen and spattered beside her name: Lucille.

A thud sounded next to him, and he jumped, and hastily scrawled his signature. Lord Thomas Sharpe, November 28th, 1885. 

More than a year late.

He looked up to see a large wooden box on the counter beside the register. While the elderly matron jotted down notes, a male orderly pried open its lid. Against the brilliant white of the sanitarium walls, the floor, and the whirling snow outside, the interior of the box was an abyss. He reached in and felt the coarse hair of her cloak, the teeth of her sapphire-studded comb. His fingers brushed against silk. He raised up a cerulean frock to shoulder height; it barely reached to his knees.

“Forgive me, Lord Sharpe,” the matron said, a Swiss-French lilt in her voice. “But I don’t imagine you or Lady Sharpe will be needing that any longer. It won’t fit her, and one of our young ladies could use it, if you would be so kind.”

Thomas clutched the shoulders. Seven years had passed since he had seen Lucille wear it. He had watched its hem flutter in the wind as a policeman carried her, writhing and snarling, to the black stagecoach waiting beneath the gate of Allerdale Manor.

“Yes, you’re right,” he said, with a light, genteel laugh. He let the frock slither through his fingers and back into the old woman’s arms. “My sister is a grown woman. If it would benefit one of the young ladies, please, take it. The cloak, too.”

Thomas slid the comb into his pocket and peered into the box. The gaslight of nearby lamps caught the bulbous garnet of Mother’s ring. It huddled in a corner like an insect, with a grotesque red thorax and silver legs. He closed his fist around it. This, she would want.

“You’ll need to sign one more time for the release of the clothes, Lord Sharpe, but that should be all. She’ll be out in a few moments.” The matron sniffled, and Thomas saw that her eyes were red. “You know, we had our struggles with Lady Sharpe at first, but she has made some dramatic improvements over these past few years. Even in the last few weeks, why she-” She stopped, and sniffed again. ”To have been part of such a transformation; oh, it stirs my soul.”

A fat tear rolled down her cheek. Thomas lowered his eyes and smiled as she dabbed her face with a lace handkerchief. “Thank you,” she whispered, no doubt taking his aversion for politeness. 

He wondered if this woman's hand had held the broad-nibbed fountain pen that had redacted whole sentences from Lucille’s letters to him. Those letters had been their only link since the police had taken them away from Allerdale Hall. Thomas had huddled over them beneath the sheets of his bunk during his first nights in boarding school. His tears dampened the pages as he touched himself, dreaming it was her hand that soothed him.

Lucille had quickly caught wise to her censors and had learned to fill the bodies of her letters with bland trivia and hide her true messages in the flowery borders of the stationery. 

_We are apart now, but we have paid for our freedom _, beneath the shelter of a lily petal.__

_I fear nothing here, for I know you love me _, inscribed in the capillaries of a leaf. _Fear not, for I love you. _____

He buried his correspondence back to her in his own way. He tore pages out of his textbooks and filled the diagrams with words, or sent her annotated versions of his crude blueprints. _I need you, but I read your letters and try to remember that I am not alone. I dream of the day I can leave, so I can set you free. ___

Before long, Thomas's studies took hold of him. He immersed himself in books, scavenged parts for new toys and machines, and delighted his teachers, and so the powers of Lucille’s letters waned. Years passed, and the borders of her letters turned from gardens to treacherous woods. _I cannot bear much longer. Soon you will have the power. You must come. You must. ___

_I have not forgotten _, he would write beneath an equation laden with Greek letters. His pen dragged, his hand lethargic with guilt.__

When graduation loomed, Thomas's mentor, Professor Livingstone, encouraged his protege to stay on an extra year, so that the boy could help maintain and build his machines. The professor's mind had remained dexterous as even as his hands turned gnarled and stiff, and Thomas adored him. He pleaded with Lucille for more time. In her letter back, harsh words— _abandoned, betrayed _—sprouted from vines like thorns. She nestled her ultimate acquiescence in a rose. _Because I love you, I will wait. _____

Thomas cheerfully labored days and nights in the professor’s workshop, while Livingstone brokered the boy’s admittance into Durham University. As he held his acceptance letter, Thomas drifted into fantasies of building his own marvelous machine, capable of wrenching rich red clay from unyielding Crimson Peak. His naked, boyish ambition leaked into another written plea to Lucille. She wove her response around an ivy stem.

_We cannot afford to further educate you and further imprison me. I will secure the terms of my release. You will come for me. Then we will decide._

This last letter had laid open on his lap as he crossed Britain by stagecoach, the Channel by steamship, France into Switzerland by train. He read the words again and again. Her pen strokes were tight, precise, far different from the languid lines that once proclaimed her love. He wondered, and dreaded, who would be waiting for him beyond the gates of the sanitarium. The children they had been were strangers now.

Thomas heard a set of doors groan, and he plummeted out of his thoughts. Footfalls sounded on the floor in lockstep. His knees quivered. He gripped the edge of the counter and forced himself to look up.

Lucille stood between two large male orderlies, who huddled close but kept their hands off of her. Thomas ran his hand through his hair, and then down his throat, as he rose to look at her. She had grown tall, nearly as tall as he. Her dress and coiffure had a crudeness and harshness to it. Her rich dark hair had been wound into a tight bun. Her pine green frock was stark and unembellished, her neckline high. Her lips, untouched by rouge, were still a ravenous red. 

Their eyes locked. Hers were wide and green, as he remembered. Those red lips quivered. She gasped with a desperate relief.


	2. Chapter 2

“Dearest brother,” was all Lucille said in the carriage ride away from the towering white sanitarium. Her voice had grown smokier and darker. She sat rigidly beside Thomas, clasping his hand in her own. To his surprise, hers was warm. A charge filled the cabin; Thomas could feel it on his skin. The air grew thick, as it might before a thunderstorm. 

More than a week’s travel separated them from the shelter of Allerdale Hall. Thomas had found them an inn in Aubonne for the night, before they would make the trek to Lausanne and then north to Strasbourg. The innkeeper smirked at him as he introduced himself and signed another register with a trembling hand. For the second time today, he felt like a boy apeing a man. Lucille stood behind him and watched. 

Their room was a far cry from both the drafty sanitarium halls and their garret nursery in Cumberland, with its decaying murals and swarms of moths. Here, lamplight washed the freshly-painted walls in gold. A fire snapped and crackled in the great hearth. The posters of the large oak bed mirrored the silhouettes of the trees outside the window, their black branches grasping at the crimson streaks in the winter sky. 

As the porters shuttled in their trunks, the Sharpe siblings paced about on opposite sides of the room, furtively glancing at one another. Thomas slipped the departing men a few pound notes while Lucille walked over to the window and rested her hand on the drapes. As the door latch clicked, she undid their tie, and they swept over the remains of the sunset.

Lucille walked towards him slowly, savoring each step. She ran her fingers along the curve of a porcelain vase filled with winterberry stems as she passed. She looked away to admire it, and Thomas’s gaze fell on her long dark lashes.

“It’s all a bit extravagant, isn't it?”

“We need to stay somewhere,” Thomas replied. “And after being in that place for so long, you deserve to-”

“It’s perfect. It's just like I imagined, every single night.”

As Thomas watched her approach, his heart tightened with longing. Everything that had filled the past seven years—his schooling, Professor Livingstone’s experiments, his own inventions and dreams of attending university—evaporated. The fabric of his frock coat swam around him. Who had he been without her? What had sustained him?

She stepped closer and ran her fingers through his hair. “So many years since they took me from my Thomas,” she murmured, reaching down to stroke his jaw. “Who is this man they’ve sent me in his place?”

“I’m the same, Lucille.” Thomas’s voice quaked. “The same as you remember.” He couldn’t breathe. He licked his lips. 

She traced a line down his throat with her finger, lingering on his Adam’s apple. She then leaned against his chest, inhaling deeply. “No,” she said. “We told each other we would never be the same after Mother died.” 

Thomas immersed his face in her hair. He could smell a touch of lavender and the unmistakable scent of her sweat. He reached up and began snatching at pins and combs, all of the unfeeling instruments that imprisoned her hair, letting them tumble to the carpet. She put her hands on his chest and pushed him back. Locking eyes with him, she pulled the pins out, one by one, as he watched. Each time, she freed a new auburn lock to cascade down her shoulders.

Soon it was all loose, waves of it, spread across her chest, down her back. The glossy curtain that had enveloped him as he cried as a child, alone with her in the nursery. The one that waved like a banner as Mother dragged Lucille into the hall, her cane in her other hand. The one that brushed his cheeks when Lucille leaned over him, naked, on that day when they had looked at one another and everything changed. 

Thomas threw off his coat. Lucille unfastened the buttons of his shirt, her nostrils flaring as each came undone. He spun her around, pulled her close, and unhooked the clasps of her gown, which ran down her back like a second spine. The fabric spread apart, forming green wings against her exposed skin. He tugged at her corset laces and felt for the metal hooks that studded the whalebone and sateen cage. When his hands faltered, Lucille guided them with her own, until the corset snapped open and fell to the floor. 

Thomas reached in and felt her silk chemise, and the flesh beneath, give under the pressure of his fingertips. The curves of Lucille's breasts and hips were unfamiliar; they had become fuller, more dramatic. He placed his hand on the base of her spine and ran his fingers down her buttocks. A woman’s body.

As he reached for her belly, his thumb brushed against the sharp ridge of her ribs. He stopped. The sensation sent a sharp pain through his chest.

“Lucille,” he whispered, “You’re half starved. What have they been-”

“No,” she declared. “Don’t say another word.”

She stepped away, the frock falling in a heap around her feet, and she stripped out of her bloomers and chemise. Candlelight glanced off of the curves of her naked body as she circled the bed; she was an undulating vision of porcelain, ebony, and gold. Thomas could see that she had gone hungry, yes, but, oh, the delicate shadows upon her collarbone, those dark, pert nipples. He crept toward the bed in a trance.

A small, timorous voice cried out in the back of Thomas’s mind. He had only known Lucille’s adolescent body and had not laid a hand on a woman since the day the authorities had wrenched them apart. He only knew to dream of the girl she had been. Seeing Lucille now, with long, elegant limbs, a patch of dark hair rising from between her thighs, he felt a strange new hunger writhe inside of him. He froze at the edge of the bed, swallowing hard as she reclined across the surface of the mattress. 

“Thomas. What’s wrong?” Her brows knitted. Her lips parted as if in fear.

“You’re-you’re incredible,” he stammered. “I couldn’t even have imagined you this way.”

“You’re afraid of me.” Her voice grew icy.

“No, you don’t understand. I’ve barely been in the same room as another woman since we were sent away. I don’t know how to...how to…” His voice trailed off. He felt his cheeks growing warm. 

Her eyes darkened and gleamed, while her lips curved into the slightest of smiles. She lowered her eyes, traced the lace patterns on the comforter with her finger, and began to sing. 

“Let the wind blow kindly  
In the sail of your dreams  
And the moon light your journey  
And bring you to me.”

Her voice seemed distant in his ears, as though she had sung this lullaby many years ago and the music was only reaching him now. He followed it like a trail into the woods; he wanted to know—had to know—the way back. He climbed onto the bed and embraced her, the flesh of her belly settling against his. The smell of her hair once again overwhelmed his senses, and he moaned, pressing his lips to her neck. 

“We can’t live in the mountains  
We can’t live out at sea  
Where oh, where oh, my lover  
Shall I come to thee?”

Heat rose off of her skin. Thomas bared his teeth; his kisses turned to nips at her throat. He rose up over her as she sank back into the pillows and snaked her arms around his neck. As he straddled her, she explored his body, raking her fingernails down his broad, muscular back, stroking the line of hair that ran from his navel to his waistband. She tugged at the top of his trousers, and he crawled out of them. 

At that moment, he felt a draft flow through the room, rushing past his testicles and his hard cock. Something creaked in the hall. For a moment, his senses sharpened. He couldn’t see the door. The dark drapes hid the light of the moon. His entire body seized up.

Lucille closed her hand around his cock and pleasure flooded through him. He pulled back as if trying to swim above rising water. 

“I heard something,” he said. “Someone must be coming. We should stop.” 

“Thomas.” She reached up and rested her hand upon his cheek. “My dear Thomas. It’s not like it was before. No one is coming. There’s no-one between us now.” She pulled him closer to her, guiding him toward her hips. “You don't have to hold back anymore. We’re free.”

“Free,” he breathed.

Lucille nodded and arched her back to meet him. He leaned down, enveloped her mouth with a kiss, and plunged into her. She took him in; warmth, moisture, and a faint pulse surrounded him. 

The flood inside him rose higher. The candlelight around them grew dimmer, and the shadows on her skin grew thicker, but in the dark, her eyes and wet lips shimmered. Thomas felt that pulse intensify, as though it was in both her blood and his own. He began to thrust, his movements growing faster and more powerful as instinct overwhelmed him. Lucille sank her fingernails into his shoulders and he gasped. He hungrily kissed her neck, her collar bones, the space between her breasts. He slipped out of her to immerse his face in the warm, musky forest between her legs.

Suddenly, Lucille pulled away. The silky skin of her inner thighs brushed against his cheeks. “Not yet,” she whispered as she circled him, climbed over him, compelled him to lie back. He felt her descend upon him. An electric charge spread from his loins to his belly and chest. He gripped the pillows and gazed at her in terror and wonder as his passion crescendoed, and the sensations became almost unbearable.

“Lucille,” he panted, “I’m...we’re…”

“Free,” she mouthed, and he let pleasure overtake him.


	3. Chapter 3

Thomas woke to the sound of splashing water. Much of the room had gone dark, but several candles were still lit beside the bathtub, far on the other side of their suite. In the faint light, he could see Lucille lowering herself into the bath. Something red flashed on her hand as she gripped the edge of the tub; she had already found Mother's ring.

In his dreams, he had returned to Allerdale Hall. He had felt the moths alight on his shoulders while the ceiling above splintered and cracked. Now reality returned to him in slow waves. The room they inhabited now was an aberration, a place between the unreality of the past seven years and the ruins to which they would return. Lucille, who had long been only words and drawings and memories, now suffused this space like perfume. Even his skin was covered in her scent.

He crept out of bed, retrieved a silk dressing gown, and approached the tub. Lucille reclined facing away from him. Tendrils of her dark hair unwound in the soapy water. He moved quietly so that he might catch a real glimpse of her before she became aware of him. 

Thomas found it eerie to look upon her in the bath. She had told him to wait in the nursery on the day she came for Mother, with the carefully-wrapped cleaver nestled in her basket of oils and soaps. He hadn't dared to cross the bathroom threshold after the deed was done, and so he could only imagine the horrors that transpired within. The thought of Lucille herself, immersed in all that red, made his blood run cold.

Unwittingly, she swept her hair over her shoulder, baring her pale, elegant back. With his haze of passion gone, her skin took on new textures, colors, complexity. He saw streaks of silvery scar tissue on her spine and mottled blue and violet on her right shoulder. 

“You thought you wouldn't remember what to do,” she said, without turning around. 

When his heart stopped racing, he circled the tub to face her and sat down on a nearby stool. “I suppose my heart remembered what my brain forgot,” he replied, his sheepish grin masking his panic at being discovered. His face fell as new marks came into view: yellowish stains on the tops of her breasts, a faint reddish mark on her neck. Her eyes narrowed as she realized he was staring. 

“Someone's hurt you,” he said gravely.

She tilted her head to shake the hair from her neck. “You left this one, as a matter of fact,” she said, tapping the patch of broken capillaries on her throat.

“These are others. Many are fresh.”

Lucille pulled her knees to her chest. “In my last letter, I said I would secure the terms of my release. It wouldn't have been enough for you to come to the sanitarium to fetch me, you know. I had to convince the sanity board that I was fit to leave. The old marks you see,” she said, tracing a silver stripe on her forearm, “are evidence that they would have had their doubts. So I gave those monstrous matrons my best behavior, and to the orderlies and doctors, something more.”

Thomas winced at the thought of countless hands—shriveled and liver-spotted, or hairy and calloused—crawling over his sister's body. His heart ached at the memories of his happy hours in Livingstone's workshop. At those same moments, she was offering herself up to scoundrels and beasts.

“I shouldn’t have stayed on at school,” he said, his eyes downcast. “I should have gotten you out of that awful place the first moment I could. I don't know how you survived it.”

She extended her legs and lay back. “I watched the other girls, and I soon learned what they knew: the right fantasy numbs the aches in your soul. If you can hold onto it, see it in your mind, you don't care about anything else.” 

Thomas moved the stool behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. “At first, those girls made me sad,” she continued, closing her eyes dreamily. “For a lot of them, I could tell that their families were never coming back, that they were going to stay in that awful white mausoleum until they died. I watched many of them sink into delirium. Some of them did it on their own. The doctors gave laudanum to others, and their minds dissolved. Eventually, I understood. If they were never going to leave, why not spare them the horror of knowing they were trapped? Once they gave into their fantasies, they were happy, in a way.”

“When you realized that, what did you do?"

“I made you my fantasy, Thomas.” She reached back and wound her arm around his leg. “I knew it would only be a matter of time until we were together again. I dreamt of our reunion every single night. But I knew my dream would be real because I had paid for it.” She flexed the fingers of her other hand, and Mother's ring clacked against the edge of the tub.

She sat up and turned to face him. The wet skin on her breasts shone, and water trickled over her nipples. “Did you dream of me?”

“Of course I did. Of course.” Certainly, he had, and yet these words felt like lead on his tongue.

“But I was not the only thing you dreamed of.” Her eyes searched his. “Tell me what else. Who else.” Candlelight glinted off her teeth.

“There wasn't anyone else, I promise.” Thomas took her bare hand, placed it on his silk-clad thigh, and covered it with his own. “But there was a...a ‘what,’ I suppose.” He smiled gently. “Professor Livingstone gave me the run of everything in his shop, from his pocket watches to his steam engines. Towards the end, he was helping me find parts to build a small model of my clay harvester, one that would be far better than those crude machines the workmen would haul up to Crimson Peak. For the first time, the potential of my harvester felt real. You and I could finally support ourselves on that land again.” He could feel himself receding into the haze of his memories, and he clutched her hand to keep from losing touch with reality. “We didn't finish it, of course, but he said that at Durham I might be able to take it the next step of the way.”

He felt Lucille pull away, and the absence of her hand sent a chill through his body. She seemed to look through him, while her lower lip quivered delicately. He knew this expression; she was scheming. Behind those wide eyes and unlined brow, gears scraped together and blades spun.

“What do you know about what's left of our inheritance?” she asked after a long silence. 

“The headmaster started giving me the correspondence from the barristers and from Finlay when I turned sixteen. The house is in dreadful disrepair. Supposedly the ceiling in the great hall finally gave way, and snow and God knows what else has been getting in. I haven't seen it myself yet. And as for what's left of our fortune…” 

His cheeks burned, and he let out a small, stifled laugh. He felt more naked at this moment than he did while stripped bare on the bed with Lucille. “I shouldn't have troubled you with my foolish letter. If it got you out of that miserable sanitarium, then it was worthwhile. But the whole idea of me going to university is preposterous. We have nothing. We're going deeper and deeper into debt. When the headmaster first gave me those letters, I could tell from the look he gave me how dire the news was.”

Lucille rose from the bath. A rush of opalescent water flowed over the curves of her body. Thomas rose to hand her a towel. She gave it a cursory brush over her skin but then dropped it and reached for him. She pulled open the tie of his robe and pressed herself against him, the silk covering them both. She was soft, warm, still a touch damp. The hair that brushed against his cheeks was dry, but the ends down near his hip bones were slick and cold.

“Thomas, I would deny you nothing,” she said as she wrapped her arms around his waist. He placed his hands on her back, where his fingers swept over rough, thread-like scabs. She leaned in; her breath was hot against his ear. “There are other ways to get what you want.”

He stroked the back of her neck. “I know I have you now, but the machine is different. It needs parts and oil and fuel, and I don't know enough yet to make a thing like that on my own. There's so much more I need to learn. All of those things take money.”

“You’re forgetting all that we have to sell.”

“The furniture? The clothes?”

“Our name. Our breeding.” She tilted his head back and stroked his brow bone, his cheekbones, the cupid's bow of his lips. “ For every wretched, forsaken girl in that sanitarium, there are ten more girls like them out in the world. I have no doubt that many would pay to be called a great lady and to take the arm of a handsome young baronet, no matter what the price. We give them the chance to make that fantasy real.”

Thomas blinked in disbelief. “You mean that I should take a wife?”

“Only until the ink on the marriage certificate is dry.” Her voice was cold and flat.

Thomas drew back. As the meaning behind her words coagulated in his mind, a sense of dread swept over him. “You can’t mean that, Lucille,” he said in a raspy whisper. “You saw what happened to them. You were one of them. How could you fathom preying on-”

“Don't misunderstand me.” she snapped.“I was imprisoned with them. I learned to recognize them for what they were. But I am nothing like them. I suffered, but I will not be made a victim. I will do whatever it takes to get us what we want. To make our desires real. Will you?” 

In that moment, he saw flashes of the Lucille he remembered from his final hours at Allerdale Hall, before the police hammered on the house's great double doors. He had been sitting on the floor by the hearth in the nursery, whittling a wooden bird to soothe his panic. She had staggered in the room, wearing Mother’s black evening gloves and a white shift, which was marked with a fat streak of red that ran from her collar to her navel. She marched up next to him and stripped off her shift, and then her chemise and drawers, the gloves leaving crimson trails on the white fabric. She threw the pile of clothes, gloves and all, into the hearth and watched as the flames engulfed them.

As a foul-smelling cloud of smoke rose into the chimney flue, she—naked, firelit, and panting—turned looked at him. Countless emotions flickered in her eyes. Vengeance. Exhilaration. Relief. Love. He did not know what she might have seen in his eyes, but he could remember what he felt. Gratitude. Adoration. Fear, winding through it all like a silver wire.

Seven years had passed, but that same girl, now a woman, stood before him now, that same tempest swirling in her eyes. He loved her. He wanted her, needed her, owed her everything. And yet he dreaded this woman who could raise the cleaver, who could look out upon a room full of people and see only prey.

“Of course I will, Lucille.” He dared not look away as he spoke. Her grimace softened into a smile, and the storm in her eyes turned wet and tearful. He cradled her head and felt her nuzzle into the hollow of his neck. “We can find a way.” A way without harm, after everything that’s happened to us, he thought to himself. She held him closer, and he felt her press the cold metal of Mother’s ring on the center of his spine.


End file.
